An individual took action that was not in step with the organization and I think he got the boot because of it.

It happened multiple places.

I’m not here to rag on any organization, I like SA because they have made material impacts to the community I live in (…)

Yes I’m familiar with this style of salesmanship.

You have a problem with Workers Strike Back and call it a front group, but there is no attempt to hide the connection.

In this case it’s usually a lie of omission. A WSB event that is presented entirely (or almost entirely) by SAlt members but they all get introduced as every other thing they are (a worker at X, an organizer at Y). The really weird subreddit that was created before they announced, had random labor-ish posts for a while, and then started getting WSB posts after they announced, but still doesn’t say much of anything about SAlt. It’s all a very familiar feeling of someone trying to pull one over on you.

They are trying to funnel political energy that is fed up with democrats but not radicalized enough, or not willing to be involved enough to join SA. That’s not how fronts work

That’s exactly how many fronts work. Being called a front isn’t a bad thing in itself. One of the orgs I work with is a front.

and eventually they would like for it to be it’s own self sustained party separate from themselves (…)

Yes I know the pitch that script was used on me for months before the announcement. It’s actually more of a copy + paste job from their sister org in the UK, hoping a few of the same things happen. The main underlying goal is to grow SAlt through labor. I’m not sure whether they internally believe it will ever be the potential coalition they sell it as, but in terms of how they actually function in practice it’s very unlikely to ever be one. Like… they do the literal opposite of building coalitions, they try to orchestrate everything themselves and for themselves and alienate everyone else in the process.

I’m not a member of SA, I straight don’t have the time between raising my kids and keeping my job. I am exactly who they are trying to engage with in forming WSB. I had heard they get hated on in communist spaces, it just really sucks to see. They do good work.

That’s the thing, they rarely do good work. Over and over again they do bad work. They put others at risk by not coordinating with them, they fuck up when they’re trying to enter new spaces, seemingly due to recklessness rather than just unfamiliarity, have terrible political analysis, particularly internationally, get themselves kicked out of spaces, aren’t part of important coalitions to begin with because they’re not trusted…

They’ve succeeded at basically one thing, which is running some electoral campaigns and raising the profile of socialists, though they also allowed much of their successes to be claimed by liberals in their orbit. But they’re abandoning that one thing they’re kind of good at to go chase this thing they’re kind of bad at instead. I’d wish them luck but it’s probably better for the labor movement and creating a functional opposition to reaction if they don’t get much of a foothold in that space and go back to running electoral campaigns. I can tell you, 100%, that WSB is insufferable in radical labor spaces due to the way they position themselves relative to and interact with others, leading to (justified) distrust. Luckily they seem to have given up even trying to work with anyone else on this and are just fundraising instead.